Jul 18
2023
The design of modern hardware components such as processors and accelerators is a multidisciplinary effort at the intersection of hardware and software development. Hardware-software co-design is a challenging task that needs actionable data to identify bugs and bottlenecks. Renode, Antmicro's open source simulation framework, enables pre-silicon HW/SW co-design for complete SoCs such as OpenTitan, with a fully controllable environment including cores and I/O blocks, capable of running binary-compatible software and providing complete insight into its execution. Read more
Jul 10
2023
To cover the widest possible range of complex embedded systems, Renode offers broad architecture and platform support, with ARM being a crucial part of that ecosystem. Following the important milestone of adding support for 64-bit ARMv8-A in Renode described in a recent blog note, we are now happy to announce support for the 32-bit ARM Cortex-R52 CPU, expanding our simulation frameworkâs capabilities to new use cases requiring real-time and reliable processing. Read more
Jul 5
2023
The STM32 series from ST Microelectronics is one of the most widely used MCU families in the world, powering thousands of products worldwide, including many that we are helping our customers develop their projects. To test embedded software, projects like ChromiumOS Embedded Controller are using Renode, which allows us to continuously improve the support for that MCU product range in our open-source simulation framework. One of the more interesting STM32 platforms we have recently added as part of a customer project is the STM32WBA, an ARM Cortex-M33-based secure 2.4GHz SoC with Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy (BLE), suitable for scenarios requiring reliable wireless connectivity. STM32WBA is used in platforms such as the NUCLEO-WBA52CG. Read more
Jun 23
2023
Besides main application cores that are directly exposed to the users, many industrial and consumer devices include embedded controllers, which, although fairly invisible to the user, perform critical system tasks such power management, receiving and processing user input, or signals from sensors like thermal. Given their role in the system, those MCUs need to be rigorously tested in CI, and using physical hardware for that can only go so far - that is why Antmicro often helps customers adopt Renode, its open source simulation framework, to enable testing of embedded controllers in CI at scale, in a deterministic manner and with complete observability. Read more
May 31
2023
Creating real-world test cases for a project plays a key role in releasing bug-free and secure software, especially for mission-critical embedded systems. The Zephyr RTOS, which Antmicro often uses (and ports) for building real-world industrial devices for its customers, features many tools to facilitate better testing, including Twister, a dedicated test runner which can orchestrate testing on hardware and in simulation. Read more